There's a new site header thanks to the efforts of decs. (Refresh if you're not seeing it.) The logo issue is a touchy one but the good 'ole "backwards/forwards F" combination is a good interim, if not final, logo.

A forum theme is still in the works, but since I'm exceedingly lazy, have classes, and then life on top of it all, things are moving very slowly. Since I have a logo to use, though, it should be a bit easier to make decent looking buttons (which is always an annoying little job in forum theming).

Jesse and I have been workin' on cz2 a lot lately...tryin' to find its sweet spot to hit it just right. We sorta put it aside while we worked on hunted, but now we're back to it even though hunted still ain't done, baby. We found out that cz2 can handle the train better than hunted, and the train's what we're all about. If you can't handle the train, then you need to get outta here and go get me a chicken sangwich before someone is hurt...cause when I saw the sign glowing in the night, I thought to myself, "I'd love a chicken sangwich right now."

For the most part, we're still tryin' to get some of the basic brushwork done, cause we kinda started over with most of cz2. Not with the area in the one released screenshot of cz2, but with the rest of the map. Those areas played out in right field...cause they stunk. You see, cz2 was startin' to have a more realistic look to it, like hunted's look. For example, cz2 had some metal warehouses...you know, the kind of metal warehouses that you've probably seen plenty of times already in your night terrors. So, we decided to change cz2's look to a more "Fortressy" style, which basically means random cool brushwork and team colored textures on a...bun. There's got to be some sesame seed glue out there!

We finally looked into Source's texture lighting, as well as how we can use it with light props. The effects are pretty cool, I think. It's way better then being tickled, cause texture lighting starts off fun like tickling but doesn't end horribly. I dunno why we never looked into Source's texture lighting before, considering Jesse and I (and most TFC mappers) used texture lighting all the time back in the old TFC mapping days. Slip 'N' Bleed From the Aaaanus, they shoulda called this ride.

MrBeefy recently came onboard. He's all hopped up on the Q, so he's been makin' a lot of FF textures that should come in handy for the FF maps. He takes advice and criticism well, so dat's coo'. He also hasn't been kidnapped yet, which is also pretty coo'. If he plays, he's gonna get a free snow cone.

I got two straws in here...in case one breaks down.

Go Astros!

Hi. I'm a Painter. I'll be painting things. I started last week. I don't really have much to say yet, other than the fact that your eyes start to burn when you switch from looking at red things to looking at blue things and back again.

I really need some more RAM for my computer. No really, I only have 512MB and I thought that would be enough - however a combination of a 2500+ file project in Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and the Source engine (which only needs to be run once before rendering my computer pretty unusable until I next reboot) gives me plenty of time to sit around waiting for my computer to respond to input.

Anyway, currently my work is in the glamorous area of bug-fixing. While most of the main features are now in, a lot of them need either fixing or adding to in some way or other. I know some of you will be wondering "why not add all the features first then iron out the issues", and for you people I have this professionally prepared graph.


As you can see stuff gets harder and longer to fix the longer you take to get round to doing it. For example, fixing a typo in "The Enemy has your flga!" done at the start of the graph would be pretty simple. I'd know which file to go to and just change it. However doing it 7 months down the line I probably wouldn't remember what file it was in, where in the file it was and what the correct spelling of 'flag' was anyway (maybe).

By the way, that blip at the end isn't actually something meaningful, I just slipped with the brush tool.

Bugfixing is generally quite boring, as a lot of it is stuff like "The nailgun is firing 0.08s too slow" or "the civilian has grenades that's not right is it". We have a whole bugtracker with all the open (ie. not fixed) bugs listed, along with comments & details of who is working on fixing it. I'm running a private bet with FryGuy (private as in, he doesn't know about it) that by the first release there will be at least 250 bugs listed and hopefully fixed. This is something to do with him saying that he thought there be too few bugs to justify about 80 million bug categories but I can't really remember.

Anyway that wasn't quite as FF-progress related as I had hoped, still hopefully next time.

Hello,

Just a small update for you all. As of late I have added all the sounds to the mod. Now the task set before me is to make sure they work like they are supposed to (all 350 of them). Then after that, it's just a matter of testing before I know whether to replace or tweak them.

So, even though you cant see the progress in a media update...rest assured that a huge chunk of the game is currently being worked on by yours truly, and will be ready for release.

Cheers!